Demand Reason

Posts Tagged ‘candidate’

Keyed-up patrons of the bloviating orange-hued candidate regularly say Donald Trump “tells it like it is.” But what does that even mean? Taken at face-value, a person who “tells it like it is” should be a person speaking the truth, right? But given Trump’s propensity to turn reality to a putty his tiny hands find malleable, why do his defenders continue to insist he “tells it like it is”? In the ten months Donald Trump has been on the presidential campaign trail, his ignorance has proven limitless. It’s not just that Donald Trump is objectively (and often) wrong, fact-checking has shown him to be alarmingly misguided. Nonetheless, Trump…Read On…

We’ve heard it many times before, the speech where a candidate declares he or she is “suspending” their campaign. But, why not just say the campaign has come to an end? Because the use of the word “suspend” seems too “focus group,” right? But it turns out, as well as being the softer language politicians love to use when it comes to anything negative, there’s a good reason why politicians suspend their campaigns instead of ending them. A losing campaign is often in debt. It may still have staff to pay as the campaign winds down. It may have outstanding…Read On…

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says whatever is on his mind without much concern for the truth. Stephen Colbert once joked about politicians who speak from the gut on things they “feel” are right, calling it “truthiness.” But, I can think of a lot of other words to describe Donald Trump. Feckless, wretchedness, aggressiveness, righteousness, bitterness, craziness, carelessness, ruthless, reckless. But, there’s also another word to describe Donald Trump, at least as it relates to 9/11, the Iraq war, and the Bush administration. Witness. But then we were all witnesses, right? We saw George W. Bush lead us into a war on…Read On…

Only an hour after news broke of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with no time to wait for the body to cool, said, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.” Somewhere in that thought process McConnell forgot the people already spoke when they elected Barack Obama to a second term. There is always a potential for a Supreme Court nominee in every presidential term. Of course during the 2012 election,…Read On…

For the past few weeks, Donald Trump has dominated the news commentary shows. A common melody intoned from the mouths of hosts and guests is that Donald Trump is, well, trumping media coverage of all the other Republican candidates. The obtuseness of the media in its coverage of Donald Trump is nothing short of remarkable. The media is by now famously un-self-aware that their coverage has become the story, not Donald Trump himself. It would seem Trump’s bloviating is matched only by media conceit. Because when a guest of one of these shows dares to point out the media’s obsession with Trump,…Read On…